I gave the subject a check. From Tom’s Hardware, industry predictions are like:
Year
Capacity (in TB)
2022
1~22
2025
2~40
2028
6~60
2031
7~75
2034
8~90
2037
10~100
Or, doubling roughly each 4y. Based on that the state of art disks would 500TB roughly in 2040. Make it ~2050 for affordable external storage.
However note that this is extrapolation over a future estimation, and estimation itself is also an extrapolation over past trends. Might as well guess what I’m going to have for lunch exactly one year for now, it’ll be as accurate as that.
To complicate things further currently you have competition between two main techs, spinning disks vs. solid state. SSD might be evolving on a different pace, and as your typical SSD has less capacity it might even push the average for customers back a bit (as they swap HDDs with SSDs with slightly lower capacity).
I gave the subject a check. From Tom’s Hardware, industry predictions are like:
Or, doubling roughly each 4y. Based on that the state of art disks would 500TB roughly in 2040. Make it ~2050 for affordable external storage.
However note that this is extrapolation over a future estimation, and estimation itself is also an extrapolation over past trends. Might as well guess what I’m going to have for lunch exactly one year for now, it’ll be as accurate as that.
To complicate things further currently you have competition between two main techs, spinning disks vs. solid state. SSD might be evolving on a different pace, and as your typical SSD has less capacity it might even push the average for customers back a bit (as they swap HDDs with SSDs with slightly lower capacity).